


Heads or Tails

by provocative_envy



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Non-Magical, Alternate Universe - Thieves, F/M, Getting Together, Humor, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Light Angst, Non-Explicit Sex, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-12
Updated: 2020-01-12
Packaged: 2021-02-19 00:33:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22135669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/provocative_envy/pseuds/provocative_envy
Summary: “You look pretty,” Marcus says, mildly enough that it’s unclear if he’s paying her a sincere compliment or simply trying to divert the conversation away from whoever he was two weeks ago. From whoever he is now.Cho sniffs and lifts her wine glass up to the light, swirling her merlot around. It’s jewel-bright. Ruby red. “I know.”
Relationships: Cho Chang/Marcus Flint
Comments: 23
Kudos: 149





	Heads or Tails

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. this is a marcus flint stan account
> 
> 2\. an early version of this fic contained *checks notes* an actual semi-legitimate heist plot but my dumb sleazy trash peddling lizard brain didn't like it, so
> 
> 3\. happy new year!!! comments/kudos appreciated, please enjoy, etc
> 
> xoxo

* * *

Marcus Flint has a pair of gloves tucked into a small, cleverly hidden pocket on the inside of his tuxedo jacket.

Sleek, soft, supple black leather.

Cho watches him circle the outer ring of the politely crowded gallery, watches him grit his teeth and roll his too-broad shoulders back and smile tightly at oblivious socialites and long-suffering cocktail servers, pretend to sip lukewarm champagne out of the shimmering cut-crystal flute in his hand—his expression is gruffly impatient, immeasurably unfriendly, like he’d rather swing a sledgehammer at the priceless collection of abstract, mid-century modern glass sculptures they’re all here to fawn over than actually do any fawning himself.

He would, probably.

If there were a sledgehammer around.

As it is—

“Chang,” he greets her, snaking an arm behind her waist to deposit his still-full flute of champagne on the trendy cement-slab bar. He smells like generic four-star hotel soap and sleazy European cologne and, more faintly, like the tiny, cellophane-wrapped salted caramels he buys in bulk whenever he’s in San Francisco. “Fancy seeing you here.”

She hums, noncommittal, and flicks her eyes over to the dark, velvet-cordoned photography wing. Security is so tremendously, predictably lax at gallery showings. “Are we British tonight?”

“ _We_ aren’t jack shit, sweetheart.”

“I liked the Russian accent,” she continues, as if he hadn’t spoken at all. “It felt very natural.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Like a Cold War supervillain.”

He snorts and shifts away from her, tugging at his bowtie, loosening it with a brief grimace—he has a chip in his front tooth, a small, smoothly curved indentation that she’s always been a little secretly, privately fascinated by; it matches the slightly crooked bump in the bridge of his nose, the near-permanent swath of stubble shading his jaw, the waxy, long-healed web of scar tissue crisscrossing his knuckles. Because he can change his accent, his haircut, his clothes and his name and his imaginary profession, his imaginary backstory, but he’s chosen to _not_ change any of the physical imperfections. The rough edges. The murky past. The memories they all evoke.

It makes her wonder.

It makes her want to ask _questions_.

Dangerous, frivolous, ultimately pointless questions.

“You look pretty,” Marcus says, mildly enough that it’s unclear if he’s paying her a sincere compliment or simply trying to divert the conversation away from whoever he was two weeks ago. From whoever he is now.

Cho sniffs and lifts her wine glass up to the light, swirling her merlot around. It’s jewel-bright. Ruby red. “I know.”

“Of course you do.”

“You could at least make an _attempt_ at—”

“At what?” He’s smirking, his posture relaxed, his gaze slowly raking over her—head to toe, from the tortoiseshell barrette in her hair to the jagged, silk-covered heels of her stilettos; he lingers on her mouth, though, on her neck, on the daring, thigh-high slit in her dress.

“At sounding like you mean it,” she says, more plaintive, more breathless, than she’d intended. Directly across the room, an oversized camera bulb flashes, pinging off a spindly bronze piece of inexplicably elaborate metalwork, momentarily blinding her. “At—at being original. You can do better than _pretty_.”

He stares down at her for a moment, with an oddly impersonal, oddly charged kind of intensity, like he’s weighing the pros and cons of several different responses. “Fine. Yeah.” He dramatically clears his throat. “You look highly intelligent this evening, Chang. Incredibly clever.”

“Oh, my god.”

“Independent, too,” he deadpans, smirk twitching wider. Slyer. “ _Fiercely_ independent.”

“Stop.”

“An obvious, undeniable ten on the classic, not at all made-up role model scale of—”

Cho huffs out a short, helpless laugh, spinning around to place her wine glass down, hoping to mask how flushed her cheeks are. How shaky her smile is. She isn’t here for this. For Marcus Flint. She never is. She’s here for a fantastically rare, gorgeously underexposed photo of Havana at dawn, blurry white spears of sunlight peeking through clouds and palm fronds, seemingly shattering the windows in some of the taller buildings; it sold at auction recently for a truly obscene amount of money, is being shipped out to its new home in Austria in just a few hours, and it’s almost time to grab it.

To _take_ it.

“Thank you,” she says loftily. “You also look—charming.”

“No, I don’t.”

“No,” she agrees, glancing up at Marcus from beneath the smoky fan of her lashes. A triple-coat of mascara makes that harder than it should be. “You don’t.”

“You leaving soon?” he asks abruptly.

“Mm.” She taps her finger against the stem of her wine glass. “But I’ve had a lot to drink. Might get lost on my way out.”

“How lost?”

“Cuba.”

He pauses, prodding at his chipped tooth with the tip of his tongue, tucking his hands into his trouser pockets. “I can give you twenty minutes.”

“Before you make a scene?”

“Yeah.”

She heaves an exasperated sigh. “You’re going to get caught.”

“Eventually.”

“Did you even _plan_ this one? Or is this another impulsive, reckless, paparazzi-fueled—”

“Oh, I absolutely planned this one,” he interjects. “You should be proud.”

She cocks a brow. “How do you figure?”

He grins at her, sharp and smug and almost fondly amused. Reluctantly fond. For all of his blatant disdain for fragile things—for _pretty_ things—he’s never treated her like she’s any of that, not even when she was.

“It’s going to be quite a fucking scene, sweetheart.”

* * *

There’s an ugly, violently purple art deco clock perched sideways on the shelf above the bar.

Cho tracks the movement of the steadily shivering minute hand as Marcus vanishes into the skinny, dimly-lit hallway that leads to the lone unisex bathroom. She remembers that there’s a window there, and it’s directly beneath a fire escape. The top three floors of the building belong to one of those nameless twelve-suite boutique hotels that have become increasingly popular with celebrities and aristocrats and drug dealers and minor European royalty. She mulls over what Marcus could possibly be here to steal—historically, he prefers his targets shiny, malleable, ostentatious, with tangible black-market value, but he doesn’t usually bother with individual—

A burst of loud, raucous laughter erupts from the crowded center of the room.

Six minutes have passed.

Cho thinks about the gloves in that are always in Marcus’s jacket pocket. About the scene he’s apparently about to cause. About the spotless platinum frame surrounding that photograph of Havana, about the old, faded, pastel-colored American cars parked along a narrow, morning-damp sliver of asphalt, about the anachronisms, about how delicately the composition of all of it clings to the past—she thinks, too, about the razor-sharp letter opener clipped to her garter belt and the illegally ultraviolet laser pen nestled inside the cushion of her bra and the ratty, nondescript, thrift store NYU sweatshirt waiting for her in a plastic milk crate outside, in the icy back alley separating the gallery from a red-brick row of pre-war brownstones.

Seven minutes.

Four security guards—off-duty NYPD, judging by the patches on their shirts—are milling around the entrance to the photography wing. Another is inspecting the frosted lens of a CCTV camera, muttering into the static-fuzzy radio harnessed to his chest. Two more are gesturing emphatically at the ceiling, noses wrinkled in confusion. In suspicion.

Nine minutes.

She could leave.

Ten minutes.

She _should_ leave.

Eleven minutes.

Cho ducks her chin, feigning good-natured shyness; collects her bag, looping the tinkling gold chain strap around her wrist; and slinks into the bathroom hallway.

* * *

The door is locked—of course the door is locked—but fifteen seconds, an expired AmEx, and a bobby pin plucked from the knot of Cho’s rapidly wilting chignon fixes that.

“Hey, what the _fuck_ , man,” Marcus immediately snaps, hunching over whatever he’s tinkering with at the porcelain pedestal sink, “do you understand what a— _Chang?”_

Cho shushes him, plastering herself against the door and twisting the lock shut behind her. The bathroom is small, clearly meant for one person, not two, and he’s big enough on his own—tall enough, _broad_ enough—that she’s uncomfortably close to being able to reach out and touch him. His hand. His shoulder. His jacket sleeves are bunched up, exposing his wrists and forearms, thick and corded with muscle; there’s another scar, too, a rumpled patch of discolored skin with an oddly uniform shape that she suspects might’ve been a tattoo, once upon a time.

“There’s a problem,” she says quietly, heels clacking on the subway-tiled floor as she takes a half-step forward. “We need to go.”

He scowls. “I told you—”

“ _We aren’t jack shit, sweetheart_ ,” she mimics obnoxiously. “Yes, I know.”

His nostrils flare. “What’s the fucking problem, then?”

“Security.”

“Security,” he repeats incredulously, dropping the object in his hand—compact, metal, moderately heavy, if the staccato clanging sound it makes as it bounces is any indication—into the sink. “ _Security_.”

“I counted seven in the main gallery,” she says calmly. “Two were pointing upstairs. One was talking to someone else on his radio. They have a tip.”

“That’s fucking impossible.”

Cho crosses her arms over chest. “Is it? Really? Can you be absolutely sure about that?”

“Yeah, actually, I can,” Marcus snaps, “because I work _alone_. The only person on the fucking planet who even knows where I am right now is _you_.”

She scoffs and rolls her eyes. “God, that is so supremely stupid.”

“Excuse me?”

“That toxic, tortured, manly lone wolf _bullshit_ ,” she says, startled by how angry she sounds. By how angry she _is._ “I could have left you here— _alone_ —to be swarmed by the FBI and whoever’s still stalking you at Interpol and—”

“Why didn’t you?”

She rears back. “What?”

“Why,” Marcus fully turns around, pinning her with a withering glare, “ _didn’t_ you?”

“Because—because I—because _you_ —” Cho shakes her head, frustrated, more of her hair escaping her chignon. “Because I imagined if our situations were reversed, you would do the same for me. You would warn me. You would _help_ me.”

Marcus’s expression visibly falters, his lips parting and his eyes widening and his features softening, uncharacteristically, unbelievably, and it’s like all the air’s been sucked out of the room, like there was a finite amount of oxygen when she first walked in, when she first opened her mouth, when she first decided to go to _him_ instead of to safety, and now it’s all gone and all they have left is the muted hush of a commercial heating unit and a daunting sense of uneasy, unpredictable inevitability.

And each other.

They have that, too.

“We really do need to go,” she says, and he quickly blinks, clenching and unclenching his jaw, his _fists,_ like he’s been holding himself back from—

Footsteps echo from down the hallway.

_Voices_.

“Fuck,” Marcus sighs, squinting doubtfully at the window. At how small it is. It doesn’t have any bars, at least. He grabs whatever he’d dropped into the sink and shoves it in his jacket pocket, the same pocket as the gloves, and then flicks a thoughtful, lingering glance over at Cho, like he’s sizing her up. “Can you climb a ladder in that?”

* * *

It’s a temporary, awkward, imperfect solution.

It’s also a linen closet.

“So,” Cho tries, stretching her legs out, crossing her ankles, tapping the pad of her thumb against the damp, partially unscrewed cap on the flask of whiskey—amber-brown, smoky-sweet—that Marcus had produced as soon as they sat down. “What were you doing, anyway?”

“When?”

“Just now. In the bathroom.”

He grunts. “Prep.”

“For?”

He puffs his cheeks out, cracks his knuckles, agitated and impatient, and then extends his arm, reaching into her lap for the flask. “None of your business, sweetheart.”

She purses her lips. “Is it dangerous?”

“Yes.”

“Well, are we _in_ danger?”

He takes a pointedly enormous gulp of whiskey, using the back of his wrist to wipe his mouth. “Probably.”

Cho nods, absently peering up at the single flickering lightbulb hanging from a tattered beige cord. The shelf she’s leaning back against is full of spa towels. Washcloths. Pillow cases. Everything _reeks_ of laundry detergent and lavender oil. Marcus is wedged in next to her, shoulder to thigh, the solid, sturdy heat of him seeping through the fabric of her dress. His shirt. His jacket. She wonders if he’s always this warm or if it’s just—residual. From the stress. From her.

“Never have I ever,” she blurts out, twisting her fingers together, “um—never have I ever _gotten caught_.”

A pause, thick with uncertainty. “That’s a very broad, very—what is it—very _ambiguous_ statement, Chang.”

She shrugs. “It’s true.”

“Doing what?”

“What?”

“What the fuck have you _never gotten caught_ doing, exactly?” he asks. “We aren’t talking about jobs, are we?”

The nape of her neck prickles—hot, stinging, _aware_ —as she steals the flask back from him. “I mean, I could have been talking about jobs.” She was. “You can’t assume I wasn’t.”

“I sure as shit _can_ , actually.”

“If you want to get _technical_ —”

A bark of low, gravelly laughter. “That’s me, yeah,” Marcus drawls. “Always wanting to get fucking _technical.”_

“—I haven’t gotten caught doing, um, doing _that_ , either,” Cho finishes, taking a sip of whiskey to hide her face. Her mortifyingly red, splotchy, blushing face. “Technically.”

“Then why are you drinking?”

She snorts out a giggle, the alcohol catching up with her. “Can we just—can it be your turn now? Please?”

He quirks his lips. “Never have I ever . . . been a cheerleader.”

“Oh, come on, seriously?”

“You were, weren’t you?”

She groans, lifting the flask to her mouth again. “Only because there wasn’t a girls’ lacrosse team.”

“ _Lacrosse?”_

“What?”

“Lacrosse is not a real sport, sweetheart.”

“Yes, it is.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“I’ve _played_ it, it’s definitely real.”

“Technically—”

“I thought you didn’t like getting technical.”

Marcus’s shoulders start to shake, like he’s trying not to laugh. “Which side of this argument are you on, exactly?”

Cho scrunches her nose up. “What? I don’t—no. Okay. Okay, just, just listen,” she says solemnly, whiskey-warm, whiskey-blurry, shifting sideways so she can see him better. His expression is mostly indecipherable, the skin around his eyes crinkled with something like amusement. With something like _indulgence._ “You’re, listen, no, you’re _wrong._ You’re very wrong.”

“Oh, I’m _very_ wrong?” Marcus teases. “Well, then. Case fucking closed.”

“ _Thank_ you.”

“Never have I ever—”

“It’s my turn!”

“Then go!”

“Never have I _ever,_ ” she says, biting down on the inside of her cheek, “played . . . _football_.”

He huffs, a short, breath chuckle finally escaping, and reaches for the flask. “Fuck off.”

“Quarterback?” she muses. “No, no, you’re too big. That would be a waste.”

“Can’t throw for shit, either.”

“Receiver, then?”

“Nope.”

“Defense?”

“You’re not gonna fucking guess, Chang.”

“ _Water boy?”_

“Never have I ever,” Marcus says, exaggeratedly loud, dragging his tongue along the chip in his front tooth, prodding at it, “stolen something that I actually _want_.”

Cho does a double-take. “Wait, what?”

“I don’t steal stuff I care about. Not like you do.”

“How do you know that I—” She breaks off, forehead creased in a frown. “Why don’t you?”

“Why don’t I what?”

“Marcus.”

He shrugs, cracking his knuckles, one by one by one. “I can’t steal any of the things I want. It would defeat the purpose of having them. Getting them.”

Oh.

_Oh_.

“Anyway,” he goes on, a little too fast, fiddling with the cap on the flask, “why do _you_ do this? What we do, I mean. I’ve always—wondered.” He stops, grimaces, and takes another swig of whiskey. “You’re too nice.”

“I’m too—nice?” Cho repeats in bewilderment. She feels faintly off-balance, but also like she has whiplash, maybe, which doesn’t make any sense at all because she’s sitting down not standing up and the two conditions aren’t even remotely connected, like, _medically_ , she’s pretty sure, and that’s—“What?”

“Too _good_ ,” Marcus corrects himself, almost immediately coughing into his forearm. “Fuck. Shit. That isn’t what I—you seem too _aware_. Of the kind of person you are.”

“Are you not?” she asks carefully.

“Am I not what?”

“Aware,” she says. “Of the kind of person you are.”

A muscle ticks in his jaw. “You’re not listening to me.”

“Why should I?”

“You’re too _good_ ,” he says again, more plainly, more vehemently. “You came to warn me when you didn’t have to about—whatever the fuck’s going on out there, and you thought—you really thought that _I_ would’ve done the same for you? You believed that?”

She narrows her eyes. “I _still_ believe that.”

“It’s probably—it’s gotta be, like, some fucking Robin Hood scheme, right? You give it all to charity? Orphanages? Animal shelters?”

Cho snatches the flask away from him, taking her own gulp, throat stinging, stomach churning. “Not quite, no.”

He stares at the slit in her dress. “Yeah. No. That dress looks fucking expensive.”

She bites down on the inside of her cheek, suppressing a brittle, bitter, comically caustic laugh—not because of the dress, no, the dress is fine, the dress _is_ expensive, but because—

“I’ve had a lot of things taken from me,” she says, with days and months and _years’_ worth of well-practiced, hard-won composure. There, in the very back of her mind, her memory, her -past—nestled snugly between the Pythagorean theorem and the precise shade of pink she chose for her first set of braces—there’s Cedric’s fresh-cut marble headstone and Cedric’s silently weeping mother and Cedric’s smile, the one he always, always meant, no matter who he was talking to, and Cedric’s art history degree, the one he was never going to have the chance to finish. “I’ve had a lot of things _stolen_ from me. And it was like—I was either going to be sad forever, right, or I was going to _do_ something about it.”

Marcus looks at her askance. “And your idea of _doing_ something about it was to—become an art thief?”

“It’s complicated.”

“Yeah. It usually is.”

“I just—I wanted—I wanted to learn about it,” Cho explains haltingly. “Art, I mean. I wanted to learn about it. It was important to me. To do that. And then—you know, when I really started to appreciate it, when I really started to finally _get it_ —it was like—it felt like no one else did. No one else _got it.”_

Marcus is staring at the slit in her dress again, pensive and shuttered. “I’m not British,” he says suddenly, plucking the flask out of her hand, the flat, callused pad of his thumb circling the slippery ridges around the rim. “Or Russian. Or Italian. Or Australian. Or—”

“Marcus.”

“I’m from Mississippi,” he tells her, and his voice—his accent—it’s a deep, slow, meandering southern twang. The syllables drip like honey off his tongue, like they’re taking their time, like they don’t have anyplace in particular to _be_ , not just yet, and she’s taken aback by how _unsurprised_ she is. This is Marcus. Marcus Flint. Unpolished. Unfiltered. This is who he is. “The real rural backwoods piece of shit part.”

She blinks. “Wow.”

“Yeah.”

“No, I mean—wow, you’re a _really_ good actor.”

He tilts his head, considering, swishing a sip of whiskey around his mouth. “No,” he says, but it comes out wry. Self-deprecating. “I really don’t think I am.”

* * *

Footsteps sound from the hallway, heavy and clunking.

Calculating.

Cautious, like they’re searching for—

Marcus jumps up with that solid, athletic, almost predatory grace she’s always wondered about, always _noticed,_ quickly capping and pocketing the flask, his gaze fixed with alarming urgency on the closet door. Cho follows his lead, stumbling a little on her heels, on the heady, woodsy scent of the whiskey, and it isn’t until she meets his eyes and sees the question there, the desperation, the hesitance—it isn’t until then that she understands.

The footsteps are getting louder.

Distraction.

They have nowhere else to go.

Diversion.

They have nothing else they can _do_.

Cho nods, not quite imperceptibly, and Marcus audibly swallows. Another second passes—two, three, four heartbeats, skipping and stuttering, only slightly out of sync with the hallway footsteps—before he seems to come to a decision, before he bends down, using his much larger frame to box her in against the wall, right on top of the light switch.

His pupils are dilated.

His breath is moist and ragged and sweet against her face.

His hand is big and hot, reverent and trembling, where it’s sliding down her waist, over the curve of her hip, hovering above her thigh, where the split in her dress gives way to bare skin and sheer black stocking lace. Her ears are ringing with a dull, sloshing thud of blood and adrenaline and panic and _nerves_ , she’s nervous, she’s apprehensive, she’s uncertain, she’s so, so _curious—_

He leans in.

Their lips just barely catch.

She sways forward.

His mouth opens.

The breath leaves her lungs in a gasping, high-pitched whine, punched out by the heat and the friction and the pressure and the slick, purposeful curl of his tongue around hers, his barely-there groan as he pushes impossibly closer, his fingertips drifting towards her inner thigh, skimming the strap of her garter—he brackets her lower back with his free arm, hitching her body an inch or two higher, hauling her leg up and around so he can roll his hips forward, grind against her harder, faster, with a suggestively rhythmic kind of precision.

She knows what it looks like.

She knows—better, more intimately—what it _feels_ like.

Dimly, she registers the closet door being unlocked, being _opened_ , being instantly slammed shut again with a frantic, awkwardly yelped apology—and Marcus draws back a little, breathing harshly, his eyes darting, hungry and focused, from her swollen, tingling mouth to the plunging neckline of her dress, to the soft, teasing hint of her cleavage—

Cho doesn’t want to stop.

She yanks him back down for another kiss.

His grip tightens around a fistful of her dress, bunching the fabric farther up, his opposite thumb dipping into the hollow at the very top of her inner thigh, and he makes a _noise_ , then, guttural, quiet, disbelieving, smoothing his palm up, rocking his hips forward.

And she doesn’t want to stop, she _doesn’t_ , but—

“ _Marcus_ ,” she whispers, and it’s the first word either of them has spoken since before they’d started doing—this. Started kissing. “We have to—we need to—go. We need to go.”

“Right now?”

She hesitates, and he seizes the opportunity to kiss her again.

And again.

And _again_.

“I, um,” she manages to pant, just as his fingertips graze the hand-sewn rosettes lining the front of her panties, “I guess we have—we could—” Her eyes flutter shut as the muscles in her thighs begin to quiver. “Twenty minutes?”

“Oh, sweetheart,” he says, teeth scraping the underside of her jaw. The long, hyper-sensitive, outstretched line of her throat. “I don’t need that many.”

“You—what?”

He pulls away, lowering his arms, letting her gradually slide back down the wall until she’s standing on her own, on her visibly wobbly stilettos; the smile he flashes her is smug, _filthy_ , heated and intense and darkly, deeply appreciative.

“I said,” he murmurs, “I don’t _need_ that many.”

Before she can reply, he drops to his knees.

* * *

It’s criminally early in the morning, and Cho is standing next to a bank of Best Buy vending machines in the international terminal at JFK, idly scrolling through Twitter and fighting the urge to yawn, when two new notifications pop up on her screen in rapid succession:

** BREAKING ** **: GAS LEAK LEADS TO FIRE, EXPLOSION AT FAMED SOHO ART GALLERY; THEFT SUSPECTED, ARSON A POSSIBILI…**

** DEVELOPING ** **: HEIRESS CLAIMS $2 MILLION WORTH OF JEWELRY STOLEN OUT OF SOHO HOTEL ROOM DURING OVERNIGHT BRE…**

“Hey,” Marcus says, appearing next to her with a ratty, grass-stained Ole Miss baseball cap pulled down low over his eyes and a pair of black leather gloves stuffed haphazardly in his jacket pocket. He kisses her cheek, passing over a steaming-hot caramel macchiato, licking the tuft of whipped cream peeking out of the top of his own Frappuccino. “You ready? I think we’re boarding now.”

Cho hums and takes a calm, measured breath, sliding her phone into her cardigan pocket and then reaching for the braided leather handle of her brand-new, mostly-empty carry-on bag.

“Yeah,” she says, sipping at her macchiato. Sugar. Espresso. Milk. Vanilla. Greater than the sum of its parts. “Yeah, I’m ready.”

* * *

**Author's Note:**

> [come join me in hell](http://www.provocative-envy.tumblr.com)


End file.
